This article was originally written during the dark ages BG - Before Google!
Nevertheless, it has some useful insights and prescient advice!.

The Hype:

"Submit your site to the top 500 indexes on the net for only..." Sound good, right?
Certainly, sounds impressive. But the fact of the matter is, it's probably not worth the
money they charge for most sites to do such a promotion. That's not to say it isn't
worth something (I certainly want you to support this site!), but in my opinion,
charging $25, $50 or $100 or more to promote a single site a single time is way
too much money. In fact, it was such a dumb spam that inspired me to put together
this site. Too many people were getting ripped off!

Believe it or not, 11.13% of the people who use SelfPromotion.com support the site!

The Facts:

Realistically, there are three types of behavior that lead to a clickthrough to
your site - a visitor can respond to an ad; he can casually encounter a link on another
site that seems interesting; or he can be looking for something specific and find you
in an index or search engine.

With this in mind, I did a little research in the logs of
SelfPromotion.com. I wrote a quick program to scan one
of the recent log files and look for incoming clickthroughs.
I then eliminated all clickthroughs that didn't come from a site
that SelfPromotion.com can submit to. I also did the same thing
for sites that I don't submit to -- these are sites that are
typically promotion-related, and link to me.

Here are the results:

Search Engines & Indexes

1481

search.yahoo.com

1097

www.infoseek.com

957

webmasters.sextracker.com

405

www.excite.com

360

www.altavista.com

212

www.toptenlinks.com

100

www.webcrawler.com

96

www.findlink.com

53

websearch.miningco.com

50

www.adult-webmaster.com

39

www.pointguide.com

35

directory.mozilla.org

25

www.lycos.com

24

webcrawler.com

24

online-europe.com

18

www.looksmart.com

14

www.hotbot.com

13

www.online-europe.com

13

www.ausindex.com

12

ausindex.ausweb.net.au

9

www.galaxymall.com

6

www.handilinks.com

6

www.euroseek.net

6

www.euroferret.com

Links to me

741

www.bignosebird.com

690

www.whitepalm.com

689

www.webmaster-resources.com

510

www.internetday.com

472

www.searchenginewatch.com

405

www.free-bee.net

384

www.promotionworld.com

312

www.animeigo.com

299

www.p-p-i.net

255

www.sitelaunch.net

243

all4-free.hypermart.net

241

www.tnapowerteam.com

200

www.htmlwizards.com

179

www.strikingitrich.com

168

www.free.com

164

home.sol.no

152

www.thewebworkz.com

146

www.katho.be

135

webreference.com

127

www.pr2.com

114

www.northernwebs.com

113

www.mlmstreet.com

106

www.absolute-solutions.com

103

www.forkinthehead.com

53

www.drwebhosting.com

35

www.webreference.com

19

www.getpositioned.com

19

www.freesources.com

The Analysis:

Look at the drop-off! None of the non-major index sites generated more than a couple
of clickthroughs! This tends to confirm my hunch; if you are looking for something
in particular, you go to one of the major indexes or search engines; you don't go to
"Joe-Bob's Link List." If you just hit the majors, you're going to get 95% of the
clickthroughs you would get if you promoted to the "Top 500."

But the other column shows that there
were sites that generated a lot of clickthroughs,
rivalling the numbers of the big guys. These were all promotion related sites.
Surprisingly, these sites generated more clickthroughs than the major search engines!

The moral - get yourself linked with other similar sites, it is a major
traffic source. In addition, search engines are starting to use number of
links (both links on your page to other sites, and, more importantly, links on other
people's pages to your site) as a criteria for how "valuable" a page is. So getting
people to link to you, and linking to other useful sites, may soon be as important
as choosing the right keywords when it comes to influencing search engine rankings.
(Now you know why I want you to put my button on your page!)

And then Google came along and made links a big part of their ranking
algorithm. Boy was I happy when that happened!

Now, some of you might say, what about "Free-for-all Links Pages?" These are
pages where you can submit a link, and only the most recent links submitted are
displayed. There are hundreds of them around, most of them running the same
software. I was intrigued, so I visited Link-o-matic,
a service that, for a fee, will repeatedly submit your URL to hundreds of these places.
They have a free teaser service that submits your URL to 10 of the pages, so I used it,
and then analyzed the logs, only to find...

Not a single clickthrough! In all fairness to Link-o-matic, other users, in particular
the author of the VirtualPromote Newsletter, attest to good results from this service.
So I did some more checking, and built my own Free-for-all submission tool (at one time part of
the Secret Net Tools suite). The results indicate that it does generate a reasonable
number of hits, but most of these hits come from a small number of FFA sites (about 100),
and the quality of the clickthroughs were abysmal. I eventually disabled my FFA submission tool
for this reason; I don't think FFA sites are useful for promotion.

A commentary: As more people start using Link-o-matic, my Secret Net Tool, and
other autosubmitters on a regular basis, then pretty soon almost every link
on the target pages will be from such a source. At which point, the usefulness of
the pages as a promotional tool will go from poor to useless.

Furthermore, many FFA pages exist for the sole purpose of sending email to
people who register with them, and the email addresses are often collected and added to
spam lists! So if you pay to be submitted to the "Top 1000 Search Engines," you're not
only paying for something that isn't worth much, but you're also paying for the
privilege of being spammed!

Conclusions:

So, what does this all mean? It means that a good promotion plan is a stool
with three legs; banner advertising (now PPC ads), promotion to the major search engines and
indexes, and equally important, encouraging sites similar to yours to give you
links (which usually means giving them links in return; www.animeigo.com has over
200 links to anime-related sites).

All of this does not bode well for sites that offer promotion services.
Most of them will promote your site to the big guys for free, so the question becomes
"Is it worth $50 (or whatever they charge) to put my site in a ton of indexes, in order
to get 5% more traffic?" For most sites, it isn't.

The philosophy behind SelfPromotion.com is to help you get that last 5%; to give you
some good advice about site promotion in general; to provide you with a set of tools
that help you do the job right;
and to let you judge how much the service is worth. If you are promoting your personal
web-page, it might only be worth $5 or $10. If you are going to promote a bunch of
commercial sites, it may well be worth $50 or $100 or more. You decide. I'm trusting
you to be honest about it.

To encourage you, one of the neat things that contributors of $10 or more get access to
is a bunch of cool tools that help you improve your site, your search engine
rankings, and bulk submit URLs to the major search engines.

It may sound strange that I've put a page on this site telling you why you shouldn't
pay money for promotion services, when I want you to send me money for doing just that!
However, I've always found it to be the best policy to be excruciatingly open with
clients in all my endeavors, even when it was to my apparent detriment. It almost
always pays off in the end. And the nice thing is, since everyone who does contribute
does it entirely of their own free will, all the contributors are by definition highly
satisfied customers!

So have fun, enjoy the site, and if this advice saved you $50, send me half and
use the rest to have a fun evening. I'll use the other half to do the same.

If you would like to reprint this article in your online or paper
newsletter, please contact me for permission.

This site was developed on a Macintosh, programmed in
WebSiphon, and served by WebStar. The author,
on those exceedingly rare occasions when he does think, indeed thinks differently.